


The Dying Leader

by deborah_judge



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-21
Updated: 2011-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:21:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If this is the promised land, she needs to make sure she'll never see it.  Set during the finale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dying Leader

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the bsg_epics ship-swap challenge. Many thanks to astreamofstars, somadanne and the other inspiring Epic A/R shippers for the encouragement and support.

They touched down on Earth together, their Raptor landing in the soft grass. Around them everything was green. Bill tool Laura's hand. They had made it. There were here, on Earth, at the end of their journey.

"There's a problem," Laura said. "I'm alive."

Bill had never believed much in the prophecies. They were tactical, necessary, something to keep the Fleet together through their long struggle to survive. Still, he knew them all, every word. Laura had read them to him as if they were the truth of her existence.

 _The Lords anointed a leader to guide the Caravan of the Heavens to their new homeland. The new leader suffered a wasting disease and would not live to enter the new land. A dying leader lead humanity to the promised land._

"I need to get out of here," Laura said. "Can you help me?" She busied herself with the preparations, wouldn't visit the colony. "I can't see it," she said. "Just help me find a Raptor, there's something I need to go do."

"You mean die," Bill said. "You need to go somewhere and die."

She put her hand on his waist, pushed herself closer to him. It's not the prophecy that's killing her, Bill knows that, but he also knows better than to think he can stop her if she wants to fulfil the prophecy by dying. He remembered sitting alone in space waiting for her to return. He might not be able to survive without her.

"We'll go together," he said.

 _Athena stood and threw herself to the rocks below, out of despair at the exodus of the thirteen tribes._

Saying goodbye to Lee was the hardest part. Lee must've known it was a final goodbye, and if he didn't then Starbuck did. They had always been good at understanding each other. They've got this planet now, the Galactica's gone, and Bill's got nothing else to give them.

They would be a new people, building a new world. Bill was glad to have seen the beginnings of it, but didn't think that the world his son would build would be one that he would understand. He still remembered his father and his uncle and grandmother and the Tauron customs they taught him, the tattoos and the knives and the drumming. Control your return to the soil, they said. It sounded like a depressing way to think about life, always holding on to what you'd never get back anyway and determined to die your own way before someone else just goes ahead and kills you. Now, with Laura, he thought he could finally understand. Prophecy or no prophecy, Laura was the president of a world that no longer existed. She's at an end. Bill could understand why she'd want to control it.

"They don't have much left, Bill," Laura said. "They need their stories, it's all that they've got to keep them going."

Spoken like a true schoolteacher, Bill though. "What if the stories are wrong?" Bill asked. "Or wrong about this?"

Laura shrugged. "We've seen prophecies come true, it doesn't make much sense to doubt now."

Oceans and plains were beneath them, green forests and grasses, birds and animals. "So much life," Laura said, and fell asleep holding his hand. He slipped his ring on her finger. Whatever end she was going to find, he would be with her. The Earth to which they would return was all around them, and it all felt so alive.

 _If you believe in the gods, then you believe in the cycle of time that we are all playing our parts in a story that is told again, and again, and again throughout eternity. The gods shall lift those who lift each other._

Two days later Bill stomped packed down the soil on two graves. He'd build a cairn above them. He'd make it clear it was of colonial origin, and the tomb of a leader honoured in life and death. "I'm going to build a cabin," he said. He pointed to a green hilltop in the distance. "I'm going to build it right there."

Laura joined him, brushing the dirt from her hands. She put her head on his shoulder while he encircled her waist with his arm. "Want to join me?" he asked. She nuzzled her face into his neck. She didn't have long left, the cancer wouldn't be denied, but she was still strong enough to walk and dig and to understand Bill's plan, once he explained it.

The graves weren't empty. Buried inside each of them was a single fragment of the Galactica. The ship itself was burned in the sun, it brought them here and never reached Earth. A dying leader herself, in her way.

They would never return to the settlement. It was the Promised Land, foretold by prophecy, and the Dying Leader could not live to see it. But they could build a cabin overlooking this world, and they could share it, in the months and days that Laura's mortal, human illness would allow. Laura was no longer the President, they'd buried that part of her, it had, as the prophecy required, died before she even reached Earth. And he was certainly no longer the Admiral, there was hardly a use for one without the Fleet. They could control their return to the soil, he had explained to Laura. Even if it was prophesied, they could control it. They could give themselves a little more time.

In the bright Earth sunlight he took her hand. She smiled, then kissed him, open-mouthed. "And now we've got nothing," she said. "We've buried it all. No prophecies, no politics, no Fleet."

"I've got you," Bill said. "And you've got me." She kissed him again, and he knew that would be enough. Then they started walking, so they could get up the mountain and make a start on their cabin by nightfall.


End file.
